Jeff Epler's blog

About me

I've been a computer programmer since I first started typing in program
listings on a Commodore Vic 20 when I was about 8. My hobbies include
electronics, CNC manufacturing, photography, beer and winemaking.

I live with my wife, cat, and lots of left-over parts from unfinished
projects in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

It remains unclear to me whether effective quantum computing -- which I think of as something that can implement algorithms like Grover's and Shor's -- is a mere matter of engineering, or whether it requires one or more scientific breakthroughs. So many companies doing public-facing research in the area act like it's the former, but authors like Mikhail Dyakonov who know much more than me act like it's the latter. The thing about scientific breakthroughs is that it's hard to put timelines on them; the hoped-for breakthrough might never come.

As bad as C/C++ can be, particularly for systems that have to be secure in the face of untrusted input, it's simply not financially possible for companies to transition their legacy systems to anything else. Take some random and unnamed commercial codebase for example -- while 'sloccount' isn't the Word of God, here's a big application that it says would cost just north of $100 million to write from scratch. But it also depends on any number of file format libraries; just one of them, sloccount reports, is $43 million in its own right. There are maybe 3 or 4 such libraries, and they're all in C++. And then there's the one that the company buys in binary-only form, so you're stuck into a single C++ ABI unless you fork over a 5- or 6-digit quantity of money for a fresh build with a different toolchain! You simply can't rewrite this in rust or other "safe" language, not even your core codebase. You also have to grow 5 or 6 people who are such domain experts that they can write, from scratch, file format libraries for formats where the (complicated × niche) product is huge. And again, whole 'sloccount' is not the word of god, it might say your schedule for just the two subtasks above is 10 years for a staff of 100, which already dwarfs your current development staff. May the address-space layout randomizer have mercy on us all.

The Gaia spacecraft is pretty amazing. Run a gigapixel camera, in space, for 5 years and somehow get the data on billions of stars home on a mere 3Mbit/s link. "only a few dozen pixels around each object can be downlinked". The in-space processing must be pretty sophisticated and high performance.

"[T]here’s the AI trained to identify toxic and edible mushrooms, which simply picked up on the fact that it was presented with the two types in alternating order. This ended up being an unreliable model in the real world."

I thoroughly disagree with the author's assertion of the equal epistemic(?) status of the two fields "date of birth" and "sex/gender" of a birth certificate. I am at home with a world where a 5-second or even 50-year investigation of the shape of a body can't accurately reveal this (once assumed to be objective and unchanging) characteristic. Just think of it like pronouncing a baby a habitual criminal based on the debunked science of phrenology! On the other hand, the truth of passing days and years seems just about as objective as anything; and find nothing particularly sinister in the way we codify it into a civil calendar which in turn enables legal contracts like "the term of the lease shall be 12 months from November 8, 2018". Hopefully we some day arrive in a world where even if there's some reason to write down quick notes on the shape of baby genitals (one weird trick for telling babies apart with ~P(0.5)!), nobody insists on printing anything about it on our everyday ID cards, or imagines it should inform our use of pronouns or whether we should prefer white wine or lite beer.

at a first guess I'm at or above that 321 hour average, based on 8000 yearly miles driving and 25mph average rate gives 320 hours, not including whatever I do in rental cars. On the other hand, we have made a choice to do driving vacations the last few years, racking up 1200 miles at a go; that driving at least brings much greater rewards than the drive to work! ETA: Average people get 120 hours of vacation?

Files sealed under codeword TESTAMENT COBALT reveal an unusual cooperative
mission between the Laundry and civilian law enforcement, beginning as early as
2009.

To quote the former Senior Auditor, it's "fractal contingency plans all the way
down". TESTAMENT COBALT was another such contingency plan, one of many
directed at establishing permanent human presence on parallel planets Earth.
As a secondary goal, it would create a cadre of grateful youth and young adults
who were bound to the Laundry by minor Geases without being on-the-books
Laundry staff.

In the late 1990s, when relations between the OPA and the Laundry were on
relatively good footing, the Laundry received a list of what we now know were
second-tier sites from ABJAD SURVEY: Generally, parallel earths which were
capable of supporting unprotected plant and animal life, but due to variations
in fundamental constants could not support silicon-based computer techonlogy.
Even then, the OPA was so dependent on digital technology that they deemed
such worlds useless for their own needs.

The next lucky break (pun intended) occurred during the human exploration phase
of the EDEN (Escaping DEmons Nextdoor) project when an unlucky team member
suffered a compound fracture due to a fall. The team medic quickly discovered
that the particular fundamental constants in this universe left all opioid
painkillers totally ineffective. Subsequent to the team's emergency return,
debriefing revealed that a third team member who had successfully concealed her
prescription painkiller addiction up to that point had felt her addictive
cravings disappear upon arrival on the the parallel now designated TESTAMENT
COBALT 2007a. After a specific testing protocol was instituted, further
TESTAMENT COBALT parallels were identified (TC2007b-f, TC2008g-w and TC2009x-ai)

From these pieces, an enterprising member of the Laundry formed their plan for
an unusual diversion/drug addiction reabilitation program. In conjunction with
a few friendly law enforcement officers in Avon and Somerset, the program
got off the ground in small numbers at first, but at its peak there were
apparently hundreds of participants per site on at least 8 TESTAMENT COBALT
sites.

For participants, the benefits were clear: no criminal record, and a complete
recovery from chemical addiction after just a few weeks in a rural area
without social media or internet. In return, participants agreed to not
disclose the details of the TESTAMENT COBALT sites and enrolled in what was
termed a voluntary national service program—until age 35, they could be called
up in time of emergency to serve the country. Both clauses were enforced by
minor geas upon acceptance of the contract.

This clause was activated by Senior Auditor Dr. Armstrong in 2014 during the
events of The Delirium Brief. Within moments, some 28,000 program participants
disappeared from this Earth, returned to their TESTAMENT COBALT parallel
worlds. Then, using the thaumic energy of approximately 33% of those worlds'
native plant, animal, and sea life, a hyperspatial isolation ("hyperstop") grid
with a duration of up to a gigasecond was kicked off, sealing them away from
the rest of the multiverse. It's up to them to survive and thrive while
restricted to an agrarian level of technology.

We can only hope that when the first of these grids collapses in 2050,
TESTAMENT COBALT subjects and their descendants will rejoin a local multiverse
that is once again habitable by the sort of life that once lived here on Earth.

"We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive"
— S.A. Armstrong

Internal Intel memos from as early as 2008 confirm a skunkworks plan to develop
metamaterials—a "superlens"—rather than pursue techniques like EUV for
post-14nm process nodes. The "superlens" was supposed to be able to focus
normal UV light onto sub-wavelength regions, impossible for traditional
optics and even according to the predictions of quantum physics.

FOIA requests show hundreds of chartered flights yearly from the NSA's Utah
Data Center to the Chandler Municipal Airport, just 3 miles from Intel's Fab 42
just outside Phoenix Arizona, starting in 2012 and continuing until April
2018.

The uncanny resemblance of Chandler's Cottonwood and Sun Lakes golf course
developments to class D and F warding glyphs; and the unusually strict
anti-occult and anti-religious symbol rules in the HOA covenants. (This would
have been for the safety of the subdivision's occupants; at such short range
even as innocuous a religious symbol as a "marshmallow peep" would burst into
flame within the area of the glyph itself)

Results from ABJAD SURVEY show that in near-habitable parallels, the most
frequent parameter variation that prohibits the survival of an earth biosphere
is in the parameter 'c', the speed of light. Variations as small as 3%
prevent pollinators from locating flowers, but even variations of 27% are
short-term survivable by adult humans, given proper personal protection.

The unexplained hour of localized daytime darkness in Chandler AZ on 4/18/18;
initially reported as a "terror attack", there were no direct casualties (just
road accidents). The official NTSB report states that the crashed Cessna 680
on arrival from Salt Lake City had no one on board.

Our conjecture:

When the Black Chamber shows up with credentials thst say "NSA" and promises
you access to an out of this world process for creating integrated circuits,
you need to take that phrase literally. But of course in the first two decades
of the century, there was no awareness of this in the general public. And if
you were on the inside, you would authorize such activities as a matter of
course.

The "superlens" technology is better understood as a pair of back to back
gates, leading to a region of the multiverse with the a 'c' value about 70%
below nominal. This would allow a UV process that supported the 17nm node in
our physics to scale down to the 5nm mode, allowing Intel to maintain its
worldwide process advantage for a decade or more.

Black Chamber produced the superlenses at the Utah Data Center and hand
delivered them to Intel staff who were unaware of just what they were handling.
The gates were presumably designed with a half life of around a week, based on
the frequency of flights. This plan went fine, until something happened on the
4/18 flight. Did containment of the gates fail during the flight, or was it a
part of a defection plan or a convert operation by one of our adversaries?

In any case, Intel never did ship a post-14nm part from the Chandler
fabrication facility.

Editor's note: Strictly speaking, 'c' is not a parameter, since it is
not one of the fundamental dimensionless constants. Technically, I should say
'ɑ'. But since the effect we're interested in pertains to the speed of
light, it is clearer to express things in these terms. Remember, in atomic
units 'ɑ = 1/c'.

Many later historians claim that it was the reports of atypical neuropathy in staff at GlobalFoundries labs that tipped off the Black Chamber to the dangers of extreme nanoscale lithography. The earliest reports, of course, said nothing about the US Occult Service's involvement; instead there were just bland mutterings about "business opportunities" and "emerging high-growth markets" to explain the (now decade-long) shuttering of an entire wing of the Santa Cara facility.

The second cover story was floated when the first leaks related BISON MERIDIAN were posted to the SCP Foundation wiki. In this version, not directly contradicted by anything in the public record, semiconductor chips manufactured with EUV Lithography produced produced silicon clumps of a particular size that allowed them to escape environmental filters and cross the blood-brain barrier into facility staff, leading to the reported symptoms.

It was actually the animal sacrifices, reported by a Black Chamber asset on the custodial staff, that first tipped off the authorities. In typical Chamber fashion, everyone who might have been involved in the sacrifices was rounded up and "debriefed" (and so what if the subjects never again have full sensation on their tongues and the bottoms of their feet?).

According to an unredacted BISON MERIDIAN folio obtained by the author, the Black Chamber's found that sub-10nm lithography techniques had inadvertently created a summoning grid for what one subverted researcher worshipped as "Otvor Bog" (literally "God of the Aperture", though possibly also a play on the English-language phrase "God of the Gaps"). Unlike most extradimensional incursions, which are information-theoretic in nature, the semiconductor wafer actually extrudes the body of Otvor Bog, albeit just a 16x16mm section of it at a rate of around 4ml/day.

This author cannot help but connect this evidence to the codewords BISON NADIR and BISON ZENITH which have also appeared in redacted reports; to the continued delays in Intel's next-generation lithography process; and to TSMC's apparent success in this region, together with rumors of the "black safes" throughout that facility. The author has been unable to confirm reports that the "shuttered" GF buildings have continued to draw power from the electric grid at a rate that far exceeds the requirements of a few energy lights and environmental monitoring devices.

One final tidbit from BISON MERIDIAN: As the primary atomic constituents of an Otvor Bog type incursion are oxygen, hydrogen, silicon, and nitrogen, (and no carbon) SIDE EYE (basilisk sidearm) is not an effective countermeasure.

Superficially similar to the elecrow GPS shield at the time of writing it's available from ebay for around $20.

I chose this model because it has a ublox GPS module and a header with signals marked "GP" and "EX". EX should be external interrupt, and it opens the possibility of a simple GPS-disciplined frequency counter.

It comes with a small antenna, short cable. One of those godawful laptop style
connectors, and no provision for directly soldering a better one. Sigh.

A 10MHz OCXO from ebay years ago and miraculously rediscovered midway down a junk pile this weekend

Nothing earth shattering or super fancy, but it is still pretty amazing to be
able to heat or cool the AD9850's (non-compensated) XO and see the digital
frequency meter change. And it was gratifying to find that the OCXO can
be tuned quite easily to 10,000,000MHz.

The PLJ frequency counter is adequate to its task. Supposedly it has a VC-TCXO, and while it has just a single turn adjustment for frequency, I was able to get it to consistently read 10,000,000MHz from OCXO and from GPS; the next day, it had drifted down to 9,999,999. Still, that's down in the .1ppm and is probably to be expexcted.

I found that when tuning the OCXO, it was much more useful to use the scope to
visualize the changing relative phases of the two signals, than to use this
particular frequency meter which needs a 1s gate time to measure a 10MHz
signal at a precision of 1Hz, and can't do anything more precise than that.

To tune the OCXO, I set the GPS-referenced RF generator to 10MHz and hooked both up to the scope. With a time base of 100ns and a persistence of 10s, it's not only easy to fine tune the circuit, but a hand-wave estimate of the error by looking at the persisted signal. If it's 1 div wide, then the relative error between the two frequencies is 100ns/10s = 10ppb = 10 milliHz @ 10MHz.

The scope has a 1kHz signal for probe compensation and it also includes the signal generator option. To my surprise, the frequency error of the probe compensation was MUCH smaller than the frequency error of the signal generator!

I now have solutions for all the numbers in this range. The longest program
required is 12 bytes. The final program found was for the number 966422:
"BABAd*EC/C+n"

I consider the 23 characters " ~^-/*+|ABCDdEFIinOorvz", but prune all prefixes
which are invalid due to stack underflow. 2312 is around
2.2×1016 or 254, but best guess my various
programs have considered only around 5×1012 or
242 due to this pruning. Still, the process (including
iteratively developing the search program) has taken several months!

I want to add support for "LSB first" to bitbang SPI in circuitpython. Probably the best way to do this is to optionally reverse the bits in each byte according to a flag setting.

Code space is always at a premium, so I investigated several code fragments for bit reversal to find out which was smallest on arm and xtensa. These code fragments are gathered from the internet. The loop is the smallest alternative on both architectures, but the 16-element look up table is not much bigger (on arm, the difference is bigger on xtensa) and is probably faster.